Quote:
Originally Posted by astronobob
This is brilliant for an 8" scope Andy   and that's a color camera I believe ? ?
Struuth, I cant create as good with the 12"SCT, oooh, what am I doing wrong, mate, what am I doing wrong,,, tell meeee   |
Thanks Bob! Just saw your very decent effort, I don't suppose you're too far away from mine, and you have 12" of aperture to play with
Advice from what I've picked up along the way... expose for no more than 3 minutes for Jupiter as rotation starts to blur it after that, but 3 minutes can give a good number of frames for your stack. I've not yet mastered the art of combining derotated images in Winjupos. Go for 40% on the histogram - the brightness is a tradeoff between shutter speed (for Jupiter I'm usually around 17ms, ~40ish fps), gain (I'm usually about 310, so higher than I'd like), image scale and aperture. I think it was Chris Go who recommended the 40% in one of his videos, though I'm not sure. With a larger aperture, you'll get a brighter image and survive a lower gain to get a similar size & brightness image. Lower gain is nice, because that's less noise and more levels. I use the 16 bit imaging option on Firecapture, seems to produce better images, it ought to give more levels in the captured image, but larger data files. The clip window in Firecapture is very handy to get smaller sized files. My settings allow me to get about 7,000 frames for a 180s Jupiter dataset, and stack the best 2-3000 depending on how good the conditions were. I use PIPP to select the best n frames, then go stack it. Collimation is important. And above all else - look for the good seeing (Skippy Sky or whatever), makes all the difference!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Camelopardalis
Nice one Andy  I've never been brave enough to dial up the f-ratio that much  |
THanks Dunk
It's probably a bit too much f/ratio, but I do quite often get better results than at f/15 (if I recall right, at f/30 I'm getting around 0.15"/pixel, probably oversampling a little on the 8", f/20-f/25 would be the sweet spot I think).